NEWS FEEDS

The RCJ provides RSS
feeds from well-respected news organizations, giving
our readers a convenient
portal through which to stay abreast of world
events and issues. Use the links provided. The
following are on the RCJ Front Page Report homepage
(scroll both columns to the right).

CCJ Publisher Rick Alan Rice dissects
the building of America in a trilogy of novels
collectively calledATWOOD. Book One explores
the development of the American West through the
lens of public policy, land planning, municipal
development, and governance as it played out in one
of the new counties of Kansas in the latter half of
the 19th Century. The novel focuses on the religious
and cultural traditions that imbued the American
Midwest with a special character that continues to
have a profound effect on American politics to this
day. Book One creates an understanding about
America's cultural foundations that is further
explored in books two and three that further trace
the historical-cultural-spiritual development of one
isolated county on the Great Plains that stands as
an icon in the development of a certain brand of
American character. That's the serious stuff viewed
from high altitude. The story itself gets down and
dirty with the supernatural, which inATWOOD
- A Toiler's Weird Odyssey of Deliveranceis the
outfall of misfires in human interactions, from the
monumental to the sublime.The
book features the epic poem"The
Toiler"as
well as artwork by New Mexico artist Richard
Padilla.

Elmore Leonard Meets Larry McMurtry

Western Crime Novel

I am
offering another novel through Amazon's Kindle
Direct Publishing service. Cooksin is the story of a criminal
syndicate that sets its sights on a ranching/farming
community in Weld County, Colorado, 1950. The
perpetrators of the criminal enterprise steal farm
equipment, slaughter cattle, and rob the personal
property of individuals whose assets have been
inventoried in advance and distributed through a
vast system of illegal commerce.

It is a ripping good
yarn, filled with suspense and intrigue. This was
designed intentionally to pay homage to the type of
creative works being produced in 1950, when the
story is set. Richard
Padilla has done his usually brilliant
work in capturing the look and feel of a certain
type of crime fiction being produced in that era.
The whole thing has the feel of those black & white
films you see on Turner Movie Classics, and the
writing will remind you a little of Elmore Leonard,
whose earliest works were westerns.
Use this link.

EXPLORE THE KINDLE
BOOK LIBRARY

If you have not explored the books
available from Amazon.com's Kindle Publishing
division you would do yourself a favor to do so. You
will find classic literature there, as well as tons
of privately published books of every kind. A lot of
it is awful, like a lot of traditionally published
books are awful, but some are truly classics. You
can get the entire collection of Shakespeare's works
for two bucks.

Amazon is the largest,
but far from the only digital publisher. You can
find similar treasure troves atNOOK Press(the
Barnes & Noble site),Lulu,
and others.

9-11: An American Coup Story

Truth Through Annoyance

9-11 Still Not Making Sense, Unless...

The video below competes in two
major entertainment categories: Most Cloying
Presentation, Most Caustic Use of Irony. The whole thing
would be a dismissible mess were it not such an inconvenient
set of documented and corroborated truths. There is a
combination of weird convergences - Justice Department
investigations, special construction activities, big
insurance buys - and deliberate inaction - well-done
FBI work ignored by the Bush Administration - coupled with
chaos at first responder levels - fire fighters struggling
with communications, military fighters going wrong
directions - culminating in unprecedented failures of
structural engineering. Steel skyscrapers collapse
unobstructed through their centers of greatest resistance,
Flight 93 vanishes into the earth, Flight 77 scores a
perfect hit on the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) record storage rooms
at the Pentagon, and Building 7 on the World Trade Center
campus collapses, making it the third steel-frame structure
in history to perform this feat, all at the same place, on
the same day - September 11, 2001. President Bush is out of
town, directed by Vice President Dick Cheney not to return
to Washington, leaving Cheney in charge and Commander Dunsel
(Bush) to fly around in Air Force One like a confused kid
playing hooky from school. This video below, annoying as it
is, notices all of these weird phenomena, and it is pretty
sobering stuff. If you don't want all the point-of-view
politics that you may find in this video below, but are more
inclined toward engineering analysis, there is a much more
satisfying presentation following: Architect Richard Gage,
AIA, of Architects & Engineers for 9-11 Truth.

AE 9-11 Truth.org

For those of you who have followed the
Architects & Engineers for 9-11 Truth, it is notable how
founder Richard Gage, AIA, has refined his presentation. His
turning his technical studies into a cause, now well
scripted, may represent insight to some. He has, for sure,
gotten better as witnessed by the videos of AE 9-11
Truth.org that we have followed on the RCJ. A sales element
has crept into the works.

By RAR

One
doesn't really have to be too far into the lost realms of
conspiracy theory to get the feeling that something has
never been quite right about the official report on the 9-11
attacks. The recent release of
No Easy Day, the first-hand report from the second
man up the stairs to Osama Bin Laden's bedroom among the
Seal Team 6 group who killed him, revealed yet another
opportunity taken by the government - in this case, the
Obama government - to weave a false story. The lead shooter
killed somebody who peaked his head
from a doorway, and then follow-up personnel plugged the
fallen man multiple times in the chest as he lay prone on
the floor with part of his head blown away. The Seal Team
had to ask a little kid and a woman who the guy they just
killed was.

Under the circumstances, grim as
they were, that story really needn't have been spun. Bin
Laden had been a wanted man for years, and he was finally
located and killed. So why did the Obama Administration give
us what now may have been a phony and unnecessary alternative
account; one that allows conspiracy watchers to wonder for what
else the government may be providing alternative
explanations?

And then there is yesterday's
response from Defense Secretary, and former head of the CIA,
Leon Panetta, who feels
the author/retired Seal Team 6 member who wrote the book
(under the pseudonym Mark Owens), should be prosecuted:

"I think we have to take steps to make clear to him and to
the American people that we're not going to accept this kind
of behavior." - Panetta

That response makes the hair
stand on my arms. Is that not a broad threat to anyone in
the entire nation who would dare to offer an eye-witness
account of a story the administration does not want to be
told?

The Bin Laden killing, which was
clearly a shoot first and ask questions later operation,
regardless of the official claim that it was a capture-first
mission, seems not like the end of a story but like an
ongoing narrative in a long and depressing novel.

To yours truly, there has been
an arc that had its roots way back in the Nixon
Administration and has its seeds in the predatory
calculations of the international oil companies.

Accepting Behavior
after 9-11

By RAR

One
doesn't really have to be too far into the lost realms of
conspiracy theory to get the feeling that something has
never been quite right about the official report on the 9-11
attacks. The recent release of
No Easy Day, the first-hand report from the second
man up the stairs to Osama Bin Laden's bedroom among the
Seal Team 6 group who killed him, revealed yet another
opportunity taken by the government - in this case, the
Obama government - to weave a false story. The lead shooter
killed somebody who peaked his head
from a doorway, and then follow-up personnel plugged the
fallen man multiple times in the chest as he lay prone on
the floor with part of his head blown away. The Seal Team
had to ask a little kid and a woman who the guy they just
killed was.

Under the circumstances, grim as
they were, that story really needn't have been spun. Bin
Laden had been a wanted man for years, and he was finally
located and killed. So why did the Obama Administration give
us what now may have been a phony and unnecessary alternative
account; one that allows conspiracy watchers to wonder for what
else the government may be providing alternative
explanations?

And then there is yesterday's
response from Defense Secretary, and former head of the CIA,
Leon Panetta, who feels
the author/retired Seal Team 6 member who wrote the book
(under the pseudonym Mark Owens), should be prosecuted:

"I think we have to take steps to make clear to him and to
the American people that we're not going to accept this kind
of behavior." - Panetta

That response makes the hair
stand on my arms. Is that not a broad threat to anyone in
the entire nation who would dare to offer an eye-witness
account of a story the administration does not want to be
told?

The Bin Laden killing, which was
clearly a shoot first and ask questions later operation,
regardless of the official claim that it was a capture-first
mission, seems not like the end of a story but like an
ongoing narrative in a long and depressing novel.

To yours truly, there has been
an arc that had its roots way back in the Nixon
Administration and has its seeds in the predatory
calculations of the international oil companies.

(Continued
from Page One)

The sequence goes like this:

1)
The 1950s produces an extraordinary population growth
internationally, which expands markets, produces
significant growth in the middle classes in the Americas and
Europe, and exponentially increases energy demands and the
import of foreign oil. World War II had placed a focus on
oil resources as strategic assets, and firms like Bechtel
had established themselves in Saudi Arabia by the mid-1940s,
establishing close ties with the Saudi Royal Family, and
supporting infrastructure development in the country.

2)
The Organization of the Petroleum
Exporting Countries (OPEC) is founded in 1960 in
response to Middle East nations losing 65 percent of the
revenues produced from their soils to oil exploration
companies. The initial members were Iran, Iraq, Kuwait,
Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela. There are now 12 nations, with
OPEC adding Algeria, Angola, Ecuador, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar,
and the United Arab Emirates.

◊

In 1969, two important figures
in modern history join company in the Nixon Administration
in the Office of Economic
Opportunity. They are Donald
Rumsfeld andDick Cheney,
pictured above with President
Gerald R. Ford.

Ford, who would become the 38th
President of the United States (the photo above is from his
brief time in the office), had already played a pivotal role
in U.S. history as a member of the Warren Commission, which
investigated the JFK assassination. The Warren Commission
Report was a model for subsequent slap-dash official
investigations, a 10-month long effort that confirmed
everything that had been presented as the official story a
mere 8 hours following the murder, i.e., that a lone gunman,
Lee Harvey Oswald, had
fired the fatal shots from the Dallas, Texas School
Book Repository building in Dealey Plaza.

Rumsfeld andCheney will hold top positions
again in the Ford, George H.W. Bush,
and George W. Bush
administrations. Cheney -- the real-life incarnation of The Simpson's Mr. Burns
--
continues in 2012 to be a major spokesman for the
neo-conservative agenda. He has recently been given a new
heart and can now live forever.

◊

3)
In 1971, President Richard Nixon
takes the U.S. off the Gold Standard, which had been
on shaky ground since the Great Depression, when many
nations had no gold reserves to back their money and began
dependence on fiat currency - money that derives its
value from government regulation or law. Through the Bretton
Woods agreement, many nations had tied the value of their
currencies to that of the now un-supported U.S. dollar.

Note: There is no public record of Gold being stored at Fort
Knox since 1980.

◄So,
down the rabbit hole of history we go.

Or is it through the looking glass?►

Either way, things are about to start
getting really weird.

4)
In 1973, with an annual inflation rate hitting 8.5 percent,
driven by runaway economic expansion, a bubble that
threatened to over-value the economy -- leaving all newly
acquired assets vulnerable to the inevitable cycles of
recession, which are as common to economics as the Fibonacci
sequence is to nature -- Richard Nixon announces price
controls on oil imports.

5)
The Islamic world strikes back. On October 6, 1973, the
Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur,
Egyptian forces attack
Israel from across the Suez Canal, while
Syrian troops
attack across the Golan Heights to the north. The OPEC
nations have grown bold enough to strike back against the
humiliation of the 1967 "Six-Day War", in which the Israelis
had taken control of the Golan Heights and Sinai Peninsula.
That had been a product of escalating tensions, the seeds of
which were planted with the international recognition in
1947 of the Jewish state of
Israel, which ceded holy land that had previously existed as
shared territory, and about as peacefully as any other such
space.

◊

There is the teachable
moment that, for various reasons, has never arrived for the
moment of elucidation. It isn't really the people - the
Palestinians and the Jews - who don't get along. It is the
allegiance among elements within those groups to sets of ideas institutionalized primarily for the purpose of
organizational commitment (enslavement). The proof is in the denial of their willingness
to trust in their own observations of reality: what has
worked to create harmony, and what hasn't.

The photograph
above shows Jews and Palestinians interacting like people
normally do
at the Zoo in Jerusalem.

◊

6)
With the military support of the United States, Israel wins
the Yom Kippur war by November, 1973, re-gaining control of the Golan
Heights and the Sinai Peninsula, the disputed areas.

7)
It is far from over. In fact, it is only beginning, for on
October 17 the OPEC nation's announce the "Arab Oil
Embargo", targeting the U.S. (think
Harken Oil, Chevron,
Coastal, Exxon, Mobil, Atlantic Richfield, Gulf Oil
Corporation, Standard Oil of Indiana [Amoco]), and the
Netherlands (think Royal Dutch/Shell Oil). The
embargo increases prices paid by America's Western European
allies by 70 percent. Overnight, the price of a barrel of
oil sold to those nations rises from $3 to $5.11, and by
January 1974, the price reaches $11.65. per barrel.

On September 4, 2012, the WTI
Crude Oil Price was at $96.73 per barrel, and the Brent
Crude Oil Price was at $114.97. Adjusted for inflation, that
would be $20.81 and $24.74, respectively, in 1974 dollars.
So where is all that profit going?

8)
By 1974, the American lifestyle has morphed to a suburban
model, with 85 percent of U.S. workers dependent upon a car
or some form of mass transit to get to and from their places
of employment. We are hostage to our cars, the oil
companies, and to the OPEC cartel. Then suddenly the nation
finds that it cannot afford this satellite existence that
we have fashioned for ourselves. The die is cast, for in large part
we have abandoned the
inner cities and the troubles that go with them and opted
for the big carbon footprint that will thereafter characterize
American excess.

President Nixon calls for
voluntary rationing of gas sales, closing gas stations by
mandate on Sundays, and limiting customers to 10 gallons per
station visit. Homeowners are asked to turn their
thermostats down, and businesses to trim their hours of
operation. Think how odd these government interventions
seem, in retrospect, coming from a RepublicanPresident. Nixon wasn't, of course, one that was going
to be around for his full second term because he had that
Watergate problem - that weird, utterly unnecessary botched
burglary of Democratic National Headquarters. Nixon lost the
support of his party and was forced to leave office, handing
the keys over to Congressman Gerald
R. Ford (R-MI), who had become the Vice President
with the departure of the scandalized previous VP.
Spiro T. Agnew, ousted
under investigation of tax fraud, bribery, extortion, and
conspiracy while serving as Baltimore County Executive,
Governor of Maryland, and Vice President of the United
States.

There was one significant
Republican-type program that Nixon does push through in
November, 1973, before being booted from office:
Congressional approval of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline (TAPS), which starting in
1977 opens the Arctic to 2 million barrels of oil
production per day. With that, the U.S. economy has an
additional supply of energy to fuel our gluttonous ways and
lock the American auto industry into another three decades
of refinements on a 100-year old carbon-producing technology that
continues to grow at the expense of world
stability, the global economy, and the environment. And yet
we stay the course. Oil stocks soar while the DOW loses 45
percent of its value before the OPEC nations finally lift the embargo.

9)
The campaign chairman of the Ford campaign for the 1976
re-election bid is Dick Cheney, who
goes off to serve in
Congress after his man loses to the initially sunny, soon to be
dour Jimmy Carter.
Carter, who is the Obama of the 20th Century, inherits a
lousy economy and terrible international dynamics,
topped off by the Iranian Revolution of 1979 that topples
the U.S. ally Mohammad Rezā Shāh
Pahlavī, the Shah of Iran, who had ruled the
country for 30 years as a close friend to the west. He had
been placed in power initially through Operation Ajax,
a joint Central Intelligence Agency (U.S.) and Secret
Intelligence Service (British) plot that overthrew the
previous Iranian ruler, Mosaddegh.

◊

In many respects,
the 1979 Iran
Revolution,
which establishes Shiite control of the largest
Shiite-majority country in the world, sets the stage for
everything that will transpire in the Middle East over the
next four decades.

◊

10)
The misery of the oil economy and an ill-fated rescue of
American Embassy personnel from Islamic radicals who were
responsible for the overthrow of the Iranian Shah -
including a then college-aged future President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - leads
to a one-term Carter presidency and the rise of Ronald Reagan.

11)
Reagan's policy on the Middle East is uncertain, at
least until October 23, 1983, when 241 American
soldiers, serving as part of a multinational force during a
Lebanese Civil War, are killed in their Beirut barracks by a suicide
truck bomber. VP George H.W. Bush
visits the blast site, does some tough talking about
targeting Hezbollah leadership, and in February 1984 the
Marines abort the
mission and come home. Osama bin Laden later cites
Reagan's withdrawal of forces as a sign of American
weakness.

Reagan's focus is on the Cold War
nemesis the Soviet Union, which is as backward a perspective
as one can imagine, in retrospect, but it creates the
Reagan
Doctrine, part of which is committed to providing overt and
covert aid to anti-communist resistance movements. Reagan
deploys the CIA's Special
Activities Division to Afghanistan
and Pakistan,
where they train and equip the Mujaheddin forces (shown at left)
who later become the Taliban and whose al-Qaeda-associated
Arab fighters include Osama Bin
Laden. The plan chases the Soviets from
Afghanistan after a decade of fighting, but it creates an
army of Islamic fundamentalists who remain central to our
shared international story to this day.

"THE
DATABASE": "Al-Qaeda" (sometimes spelled
"al-Qaida" or "al-Qa-ida") is an Arabic translation of
the English word for the base. Former British Foreign Secretary Robin
Cook has been the source for a background
explanation, that the word al-Qaeda originally referred
to the computer file of thousands of Mujahedeen
militants who, in the 1980s, were recruited and trained
with CIA help to defeat the Russians. In this sense, al-Qaeda is a CIA invention, a database of names.

EDITOR'S NOTE:
Stop for a moment to consider
the intelligence gold mine this represents. In the
al-Qaeda database you have "our terrorist enemy's"
enrollment information: who each person is, where they
were born, their ages, educational backgrounds, and
affiliations. Imagine how many ways this information
could be used, particularly if one were inclined to
present information on an identified security threat, a
particular terrorist.

12)
In February 1993, with President Bill Clinton in office only 33 days,
Islamic fundamentalists bring the fight to the U.S.,
detonating a truck bomb below the North Tower of the
World Trade Center in
New York. The 1,336 pound (606 kilogram) urea nitrate–hydrogen gas
enhanced device kills six people and injures more than a
thousand. The name Osama Bin Laden,
the son of a large Saudi Arabia-based family whose members
are well-known to U.S. power brokers through their
involvements in the construction, oil and finance industries, is first
associated with international terrorism.

13)
In August 1998, Bin Laden strikes with simultaneous bombings
on the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam,
Tanzania. Clinton retaliates by launching cruise missiles at
al-Qaeda terrorist training camps in Afghanistan, as well as a
pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, Sudan, where al-Qaeda is suspected of manufacturing biological weapons.

14)
In the 2000 Election, neo-conservative and oil company
interests led by Dick Cheney,
who by this time is CEO of oil industry services firm Halliburton, create a
campaign to defeat Vice President and environmental activist
Albert Goreand elect
former oil executiveGeorge W. Bush.
Cheney, chosen by the Bush campaign to help vet
potential vice president candidates, chooses himself and
Bush-Cheney go on to defeat Gore and future Democrat
turncoat Joseph Lieberman
in a disputed election in which Gore gets the most votes.
Gore fights using legal challenges, while Lieberman accepts
that Bush-Cheney have
won. A Supreme
Court decision stops a recount of votes in Florida that
gives the electoral college majority to Bush and ends the
election, as well as a two-term Democratic presidency that
has left the nation with a budgetsurplus.
Bush installs Donald Rumsfeld
as his Secretary of Defense at the urging of Vice
President-elect Dick Cheney.

EDITOR'S
NOTE: Joseph
Lieberman, the Senator from Connecticut who
became widely known to the general public as a moralist during the
Clinton
impeachment proceedings, is a key marker
in this story. His presence on the 2000 Democratic
ticket with Al Gore
was a calculated sell-out to the right-wing direction
the U.S. was already taking, driven by resentment toward
the OPEC nations and anger over the World Trade Center
bombing in 1993, and exploited by radical right-wing
elements in Congress. The Israeli lobby, always powerful
in the U.S., was ratcheting up pressure on the U.S. to
support the Jewish nation as Islamic nations all around
the Middle East, many openly hostile toward Israel, grew
in power, fueled by their own oil resources. Lieberman's
addition to the Democratic ticket was intended to win
the Jewish vote in Florida, which was expected to be the
difference in the 2000 election, as indeed it was.
Lieberman's easy acceptance of a Supreme Court decision
that sent him back to the Senate and put the
aggressively pro-Israel Bush Administration in place,
seems almost pro forma in retrospect. No committed
warrior to the Democratic cause, Lieberman jumped ship
in 2006 to become an Independent, after he became unable
to win a Democratic primary to keep his Senate seat. He
had come to office in 1988, during the George H.W. Bush
administration, defeating moderate Republican Lowell Weicker. He was,
from the beginning of his time in national office, more
far right than many Republicans. In 2007, he spoke
before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in support
of the confirmation of Sam Fox
as ambassador to Belgium. Fox, a prominent Republican
businessman and political donor, was a contributor to
the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth
campaign in 2004 that was instrumental in
undermining Sen. John Kerry's
(D-MA) run for the White House. Someday a thousand years
from now, if there are still people around to read about
the slow crumbling of the United States of America at
the beginning of the 21st Century, they will read about
Joseph Leiberman the way we read about Cassius and
Brutus of Caesar's Rome.

15)
In May 2001, newly-elected President George W. Bush begins receiving top
secret reports from the CIA that “a group presently in the
United States” is planning a terrorist operation. In June
he gets another report predicting that an Al-Qaeda strike could be
“imminent”. And on August 6, 2001, President Bush
and his security team receive a “presidential daily brief” with the heading: “Bin Laden
Determined to Strike in U.S.” The response of the Bush
Administration is to launch a campaign against the validity
of the threat. Neo-cons like Paul Wolfowitz,
recently installed at the Pentagon (and now President of
the World Bank), begin circulating
reports characterizing the threats as "bluster".

A few weeks later, on
September
11, 2001, al-Qaeda accomplishes its goal, expressed by those arrested in
the investigation of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, of
bringing the towers to the ground. Along with a third
building, of the seven associated with the WTC complex:
Building Number 7, where the Federal government's
investigators house their library of files associated with
the ENRON energy commodities trading scandal. An attack the
same morning on the Pentagon
wipes out records rooms where information on trillions of
dollars in missing funds, under investigation at the time,
are kept. The records
are lost, but from the ashes of ENRON comes the
Sarbanes-Oxley legislation, and heavier regulation of
corporate accounting practices.

The other thing that rises from
the rubble of the World Trade Centers are wars in
Afghanistan against al-Qaeda,
and the Taliban government that
is supporting them, and a virtually inexplicable
invasion of Iraq. The purpose of the latter is the overthrow of the
Saddam Hussein regime,
which had once been a U.S. ally against the Shiite radicals
in Iran led by spiritual leader
Ayatollah Khomeini.

16)
The End of Value: The Iraq War, it is later
learned, is predicated on a phony report that Hussein was
ready to use "WMD" - Weapons of Mass Destruction. President
George W. Bush, for reasons that will be studied forever by
historians, topples Hussein where his father before him had
chosen a more prudent path, leaving Hussein in power after
the 1993 Iraq War that drove Hussein from U.S.-friendly
Kuwait. It is also soon realized that
while the U.S. invades Iraq from the North and South -
Turkey and Kuwait respectively - agents of the Iranian
government invade from the East, where they fuel an
insurgent underground that saps the resources of the U.S.
military, and saps the will of the American people.

Sustaining two wars
simultaneously on the other side of the globe, without a
congressionally-approved allocation of funds, evaporates the
U.S. budget surplus and soon puts us into a deficit, helped
along by across-the-board tax cuts that weigh heavily in
favor of the wealthy.

With the U.S. (and world)
economy slowing from a jobs-producing Clinton Era machine to
a jobless slog, the Bush Administration urges Americans to
spend, and particularly to invest in real estate, and a
real
estate bubble that has been slowly growing in high growth
areas for years suddenly expands dramatically. And then, two-thirds of
the way through G.W. Bush's two terms in office, it breaks,
taking the world economy down with it.

EDITOR'S NOTE:
The collapse of the real
estate market reveals something that goes all the way
back to 1971 and President
Richard Nixon's decision to put the U.S.
economy on the same fiat-type currency evaluation the
rest of the world had been on for some time.
Fiat-based currencies are designed to be regulated by
government controls, but the U.S. has never been
enamored with that type of socialist thinking, so
in the U.S. the value of things is determined by the
market. In real estate, the bullish markets of the
1990s and early 2000s, especially in the high-growth
parts of the U.S., like Florida, Arizona, Nevada, and
California, feed a perception - endorsed by
Federal Reserve Chairman Alan
Greenspan and many other key economic influencers
- that real estate values will continue to grow into the
foreseeable future, largely independent of the inherent
value of each property. So in California you get a lot
of 1,800-square foot homes valued at $600,000 and
greater, with more than half of that value being hot
air, an inflation pumped up on the strength of what
the market will allow. And with people clearly convinced
that the only remaining avenue toward any significant
level of personal wealth and security is through real
estate investments, hopeful buyers go all in. More than
that, hopeful financial players go all in, too; even
Main Street operations like Bank
of America, who offer loans to anyone who can
breathe and sign a mortgage contract. The smart guys in
the finance offices know that these loans are bound to
go bad, particularly as the economy starts to slow down
in the Bush years, and more and more buyers are
confronted with ballooning interest payments. So they
package the loans in bundles and sell them off to
investors, as they always have, but then they dump the
paperwork and wash their hands of the whole thing. The
buyers of these bundled securities are concerned enough
about their actual value that they take out
government-backed insurance that will guarantee them a
return on the likelihood that the loans fail. So long as
people in the government will go along with this,
everyone in the food chain gets over except the U.S.
taxpayers, millions of whom will lose their homes to
foreclosure, and millions of whom will see their
properly mortgaged properties lose their value due to
all the foreclosed properties springing up in their
areas.

2008: RESTORING INTEGRITY TO THE SYSTEM

17)
Politics of Surrender: The 2008
election, between U.S. Senators Barack Obama
and John
McCain, becomes a mirror image
of the 1976 Ford-Carter election, though somehow the U.S.
news industry, itself in a state of morbidity, determines to
see a John F. Kennedy in the young one-term Senator from
Illinois, Barack Obama.
(The media's pitch of this unlikely parallel is a little
unsettling, unless the narrative is indicative of some other
story in progress.) When the utterly unprepared Obama comes to office, lifted by
an unprecedented turnout of young and Black voters, and the
temporary endorsement of independent voters, he
discovers that he has inherited the worst economy since that
of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

To confront the economic
debacle, which threatens to sink the banking industry and
the world economy with it, Obama does two significant
things: he bails out the finance industry with short-term
loans using money borrowed from big European banks and the
Chinese government, and he bails out General Motors, a
company on the brink of bankruptcy, thus saving the American
symbol, along with the chain of suppliers who make up a
significant part of the U.S. workforce.

The result is that the U.S. is
drowning in debt so deep that sustaining government services
is not possible without new revenues or drastic revisions in
assistance to the poor and the most vulnerable members of
society.

There are sell-outs, too. Obama
ensures American dependence on fossil fuels, opening areas
for off-shore drilling and letting British Petroleum off the hook when their
Deep
Water Horizon well bursts and pollutes the waters off
Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and the Redneck Riviera of
Georgia and Florida.

Obama buckles to the
pharmaceutical industry, signing legislation that protects
U.S. manufacturers against price competition from Canada.
And most importantly, he champions a health care solution
that cements the role of private insurers in health care
delivery, which is anathema to Democratic principles.

The Near Future

So now we are in September,
2012, just two months away from the November election, and
the wars rage on in most ways. After more than 10 years, the
Afghanistan War appears
to be waxing back in favor of the Taliban. And yet we stay, because Afghanistan and
Pakistan are crucial for reasons that have never been made
entirely clear. And while we have pulled out of Iraq, we
fight to stay there, close by in Kuwait and Qatar, to control what is not ours to control.

Iran threatens to close down oil
transports through the Persian Gulf - called Arabian Gulf
by Saudis - and to develop nuclear weapons
that would threaten the safety of Israel.

And so, one might well ask, what
has all this been worth?

We have gained no security, and
in fact are poorer than ever. There is real suspicion that
the U.S. may have moved into a new normal, which is
to say a sustained period of diminished potentials.

And the Obama re-election? What
difference would it make, given that he has governed so far
the right of what would be required to distinguish his from
Republican policy?

Obama's health care plan, after all,
is the one devised by Mitt Romney for Massachusetts and
championed by 1996 Republican presidential candidate Sen.
Bob Dole (R-KS).

Without some major correction ▬
some massive re-direction of focus in the American public ▬
the calculations that went into pulling off the 9-11 plot
will have been successful. The Vulcans (read the article in
the column at right) have driven U.S. foreign and domestic
policy to the right, destroyed all investigations into the
financial and political crimes at the heart of the story,
and most importantly have put time between the crime and
now. With each passing year, it makes it less likely that
the public will distinguish the history of the events of
9-11, which were written in stone virtually in the moments
in which they happened ▬ through news accounts
and immediate official reports ▬ from the
truth of all that transpired.

The latter, after all, is always the work of kooks and conspiracy theorists.

Architects & Engineers for 9-11Truth

9-11: Explosive Evidence - Experts Speak
Out

The technical experts of the AE
for 9-11 Truth group continue to provide some of the most
compelling questions about how three steel-frame buildings on
the World Trade Center campus collapsed within hours of each
other due to impacts from two airplanes. The video below is from
one of those awful PBS fund raisers, but features the AE
group's spokesperson, Richard Cage, AIA, which is useful in
itself. Cage is there to promote PBS funding and to sell a
product, and the sales stain is not particularly useful to
his broader purposes regarding technical investigations into
the World Trade Center events of 9-11.

___________________________

The Question of Why?

9-11 Destroyed Evidence as International
Courts Closed In

As
with anything else in life that is outside of any one of our
personal experiences, the bigness of the story
culminating in the events of 9-11 is difficult to fathom.

The question of why, if it is
true, that elements of the U.S. government conspired for
years to manipulate financial markets, assassinate world
leaders, topple governments, and secretly support and even
organize anti-Communist forces internationally, requires
leaps of imagination for those of us without knowledge of
the intricacies of accomplishing such things. That, in fact,
is a central thread to the story: the U.S. government has
had to out-source certain of these jobs for years, with the
CIA relying on associations with criminal elements who have
possessed skills and connections that have not existed "in
house" at Langley (CIA headquarters in Virginia).

Those whose first instinct is
to accept the official story of an event as the truth will
typically erect a wall, past which any alternative
explanation is loony by default. The big crimes, like
those committed by big governments such as those of the
Third Reich, Imperial Japan, and the United States(?), have
a natural cloak of invisibility in that they are on scales
too vast for people to easily comprehend. This experiential
deficit in the majority of human lives is a big part of why
people want to trust in things: governments,
religion, their parents. We lack the knowledge to interpret
things outside of our own experience, and few of us
experience intrigues at a high level.

Then again, some people do
experience high-level intrigues. There are people who, for
various reasons, are in positions to make decisions that put
into play these giant ramifications that 99.9 percent of the
rest of us lack the understanding to even imagine.

In the story presented below,
these people would include: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld,
Colin Powell, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and a host of
others.

And yet, even the deepest,
darkest intrigues take place within the realm of everyday
human interaction. The most complex of narratives involve
nothing more than the manipulation of the reality we all
share. We open bank accounts, deposit and withdraw funds,
and we use credit, which leaves a paper trail of our human
activities. Murderers often use weapons, and leave their DNA
markers with the crime, and money launderers use accounts in
banks we all have heard of and may use ourselves. Likewise,
government leaders make decisions on how to use available
assets to make things happen in the world as it is.

How each of these high-level
individuals would interpret how one should respond to the
circumstances as they exist - the world as it is in their
view - is the type of decision basic to our daily lives.
Pragmatic decisions are made.

Reduced to that level of
understanding, narratives become far less mysterious and far
more plausible, and even logical in their progressions.

Such is the case with the
9-11 event, which is explained in the long, but well-worth
reading piece below, which the RCJ is carrying from the scribd Web site, which is one of the many
self-publishing opportunities available on line. This piece
is the culmination of a six-year study, according to its
author "guyrazor", to look into the claims of 9-11
conspiracy authors Dick Eastman, Tom Flocco, V.K. Durham and
Karl Schwarz. It has long been their claim that the attacks
on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were orchestrated
by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Israeli
secret service (Mossad) to destroy evidence of "Black Ops"
financial operations that were gaining intensity in their
scrutiny by international courts, and to frame al-Qaeda, a
CIA-organized terrorist organization that had detonated a
bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center in 1993.

At the heart of the whole
story is the "Black Eagle Fund", which was a treasury of
Nazi and Japanese gold and treasures recovered after World
War II. They should have been returned to their rightful
owners - they were the result of years of looting of
European and Chinese peoples - but instead were used to
create the central funding mechanism of the CIA in 1947. The
graphic below provides a thumbnail overview that the long
written piece below tells in detail.- RAR

The Psychology of Fear

The
Architects & Engineers for 9-11 Truth have been doing, with the
September 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center, exactly what you
would expect those trained in their disciplines to do. They have taken
the entire event apart to see how it could have worked, i.e., that
steel-framed high-rise structures fell straight down into their own
footprints, and identified in the destruction the hallmarks of
controlled demolition.

While one may, with cool calculation,
disassemble the elements of the 9-11 event, the entire subject frightens
many people at a primal level, triggering defensive behaviors that may
dissuade some from thinking about what happened beyond the version of
events promoted in the mainstream media. To analyze the mechanisms at
work in that aspect of being human, the A&E for 9-11 Truth have called
in the expertise of an expert on human behavior to explain why some
people may be reluctant to address the issues raised by the events of
9-11.

What if Perpetrators Investigated Their Own
Crimes?

9-11 Liberals

Losing Religion

By RAR

The trio above has to be the
ultimate example of the emptiness of public intellectualism in the late
20th and early 21st Century. Christopher
Hitchens (d.2011), Salman Rushdie,
and comedian Bill Maher are
representatives of a group who think of themselves as "9-11 Liberals",
forged in their non-liberal redirects by the events of 9-11, which they
(Hitchens is not here to speak for himself) apparently accept at face
value, and they are now locked into the unenlightened belief that "50
percent of Muslims want to kill us" - Maher's belief, stated on his
September 21 Real Time with Bill Maher HBO show, on which Rushdie
made a guest appearance.

There is a "9-11 Conservative" cadre, as well (comedian
Dennis Miller and the late actor Ron Silver), who became politically
right wing following the 9-11 incidents and are right in line with the
"9-11 Liberals" that the Islamic world is "our" enemy. This is a potent
blend of fear-based lunacy, an hysterical response that is completely
outsized compared to the threat that radical Islamists pose to the U.S..

NOTE: Where
exactly is this Muslim army poised to destroy the United States of
America? The largest of the armies in the Islamic world is that of
Iran, and that is under the control of the Iranian government, not
the Ayatollah, and the government in that country is struggling to
remain in control against an educated class of progressives who are
not at all in line with the radical elements of Islam. This is why
you have Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a struggle to
control the purely religious elements that influence his country's
direction, while also attempting to placate more progressive voices.
None of this amounts to a threat against the U.S.

For sure these people changed after the events of 9-11,
if only in their public willingness to call for the murder of Islamic
fundamentalists. And, by extension, to call for an aggressive foreign
policy against Muslim nations.

Rushdie, whose novel The Satanic Verses (1988),
which blasphemed the prophet Muhammad and brought an Iranian
state-sanctioned Fatwa against him, complete with assassination
attempts, was the forerunner of all that his transpired in the
deterioration of relations between the Islamic and western worlds. His
novel sought to remind people that the Koran is an edited document, with
certain passages excised for public consumption.

Big fucking deal. The Bible - the counterweight of the
Christian world - is also excised of the Gnostic Gospels and, in fact,
the vast majority of the "historic" accounts that were a part of that
publishing effort. Somebody - in the Christian world it was done at the
second Council of Nicaea - made some decisions about what made for the
best read. And that is all these things (the Koran, the Bible) are is
publishing efforts, produced for "commercial" effect.

Rushdie's unexceptional work was clearly aimed as a jab,
like a poke at a wasps nest, and the mileage that Rushdie has gotten
from that bit of swordsmanship has given the former publishing house
copywriter a literary career, complete with international celebrity. He
is famous for having been lifted by Islamic fundamentalists - who may not
represent the keenest literary critics around - to recognizable heights.
And of course that comes with a slew of accommodation from the tiny
literary world, who need heroes who the non-literary world has heard of,
and so tend to shower his existence with awards and further
recognitions. He has been knighted in Britain, which set off a wave of
protests worldwide, including from the literary community who saw this
as more of a political statement than a recognition of literary merit.
Evidence of Rushdie's basic "stuff" is his close association with the
Irish rock band U2, for whom he is a celebrity groupie, which seems a
little undermining to his credibility as an intellectual on any level.

Salman Rushdie's early work was largely set in India, and
from the first his modus operandi was to puncture the beliefs of radical
Islam. Surprise, some Muslims reacted! And so Rushdie had a big career
in the west.

Christopher Hitchens took a ride on Rushdie's wake,
morphing from a scolding exchange editor for The Nation to an
alcohol-fueled-prig, if you can imagine such a person, after 1989,
exposing Mother Theresa, scolding Bill Clinton, and harassing Henry
Kissinger as a war criminal. As with Rushdie, the general public
couldn't discern Hitchens' caustic quips from journalism of value, and
so he too became a celebrity writer, a sort of angry lecture circuit
clown whose edge was entertaining to behold.

Bill Maher keeps company with these literary
"heavyweights" only because he has been the Ed Sullivan of political
entertainment, with his HBO show and the earlier network offering
Politically Incorrect. In retrospect, we should have taken the name
of the latter as literal, because Maher has gone off the rails into an
area of incorrectness from which he is unequipped to return. His
political incorrectness, once a trope promising alternative view
points, has become simple political incorrectness in which
Maher is pretty much carrying water for the dazed and confused "lefties"
who are symbolized by Hitchens and Rushdie, i.e., people who are now
simply wrong, rather than politically rebellious. They are not
challenging the misapprehensions of the power elite, they are embracing
them, wrong-headed as they are.